About

Logistics: On Rails will be a sophisticated game about running a railroad company. It expands upon ideas and themes from games such as classic Transport Tycoon and Railroad Tycoon series.

The game places the player in the position of a railroad manager. His task is to build railroad connections between towns and industries. At the same time, he has to extract every bit of efficiency from the deteriorating infrastructure, plan it’s expansions, rebuilds, upgrades and research new technologies.

Logistics’ visual design is a homage to the classic game of Transport Tycoon. The world is divided into square tiles, and the camera is floating above in a quasi isometric view.

Great care is given to easy extensibility. The game is configured with a few ( dozen, hundred even ) text files and includes an easy to use graphical model editor.

The core of the gameplay of Logistics: On Rails centers around management of goods and passengers over the railroad. To do so the player, among other things, needs to:

• design the rolling stock at company’s workshop
• schedule production of said rolling stock
• research technologies and inventions required to produce this rolling stock
• assign enough freight and passenger cars for services rendered
• assign enough locomotives to haul trains between stations
• make sure those locomotive are powerful enough to do their job
• plan where and when to refuel, service, upgrade and decommission all rolling stock
• design appropiate station moves for locomotives to recouple to trains

Those are just a few of the managerial and engineering tasks the player will need to face, solve and optimize to ensure smooth operation of his railroad.

The game is being developed, in C++ with Vulkan as a rendering API for a PC. The estimated release date is a tentative “when it’s done” as it is a superposition of number of hours and people available for development.